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The sun beat white-bright and heavy that morning, making the freshly fallen snow of the permafrost shine and sparkle like she remembered it had when she was a child. Anastasya had once believed there were hidden gems sparkling in this very same snow, that the sun extended its rays just for her, to illuminate the gems, show her where they hid themselves. But in the end, it had always just been snow, and every time, Anastasya had nothing to show for her searches but frost-bitten hands, chattering teeth, and a vicious scolding from her mother.
“Children who stay too long out in the snow are taken by Djel,” her mother always said, as she brushed back her long, unruly red hair into the braids that had suit her sister, Isabel, so well. They would sit in front of the fire after each of her expeditions to warm Anastasya’s frozen bones, and to burn away the tears from her father’s beating. “Djel will rise up from the waters far below, reach through the snow and the ice, and claim any rule-breaking girls, the ones who spurn and dishonour him. He will take them far beneath our world, to his waters, where he will drown them, again and again.” Her mother would kiss the top of her hair after it had been neatly braided into a crown on her head, and patted her shoulders gently, smoothing the lines of her white dress. “So be a good little girl and do not invite Djel’s wrath.”
Sometimes, Anastasya thought that her mother was not speaking of Djel at all, but her father, who would turn red with rage and break Anastasya’s skin with his belt buckle, as her mother watched on, as her sister protested. And every time it happened, Anastasya would nod, say “Yes, mama,” and return to her room like a good Fjerdan child would. But it was never the last time. And it had only gotten worse when Anastasya had discovered her power over fire.
Anastasya clenched her jaw and swallowed, pushing the memories out of her head. They had become more frequent the closer to home she had gotten, her heart growing heavier with each wave of the sea they had passed aboard the Ferolind, with each foot she had set in front of the other. But she kept moving. Because she had to, because she wouldn’t fail her friends, because Kaz depended on her.
She was the Red Scourge. A demon, a witch, a Grisha. She was the flame itself, burning and ever-lasting. She would not be cowed by memories of her childhood.
Anastasya put one foot in front of the other.
The group had left the Ferolind at the break of dawn that day, leaving behind their prized possessions—Inej’s knives, Jesper’s pearl-handled revolvers, and of course, Anastasya had parted with her diamond-encrusted hairpin Kaz had stolen for her all those years ago. Instead, her hair was tied back in with some of Inej’s hair ties, and she’d strapped two daggers to her thighs as a precaution. But the biggest difference, one that made Anastasya’s head swim, was her appearance. Nina had used her Tailor powers to change Anastasya’s red curls a white-blonde and erased her freckles. There may have been people in Fjerda who wanted her dead—who might recognise her flaming hair, so rare amidst this frozen land and they couldn’t take any chances. Not when so much depended on their plan being executed to perfection.
Still, it had been difficult to gaze at her reflection aboard the Ferolind. The person that looked back at her in the mirror had not been Anastasya, but Isabel, her older sister. The white-blonde hair, the smooth complexion, removed of any imperfections—Anastasya had smashed the mirror with her fist.
“Ana!” Nina had chastised, voice full of shock. “Why would you do that? I still have to tailor Matthias.”
“So?” Anastasya lifted one shoulder in a shrug, her left hand bleeding from the glass. “You have eyes, don’t you?”
At that moment, Kaz had walked past, his pace seeming to speed up when he noticed the two Grisha in argument.
“Brekker!” Nina called after him.
Kaz turned slowly towards them, face unreadable. “What?”
Nina gestured to the mirror, then to Anastasya’s bleeding hand.
“Not my problem,” said Kaz and continued to walk on.
Anastasya grinned at Nina in response.
But the other Grisha had refused to heal Anastasya’s hand after, claiming it would ‘do her good to have a reminder of what reckless behaviour entails’. Anastasya had just shrugged again, forcing her now blonde curls into a tight bun and stuck her tongue out at the other Grisha.
Now, Anastasya forced her mind back to the present, eyes scanning the environment around her. They were in enemy territory now, and she needed to keep her mind at the task at hand.
The trees around them were topped white; full and lush ever-green pines weighed down by the burden of the snow, leaning forward in one direction as if showing them the way. Dread built in Anastasya’s stomach as they trudged through the permafrost, and not even her powers could keep the chill from her bones. Wolves howled in the distance, and she thought she could see Matthias perk up beside her at the sound, as if his drüskelle compatriots would come running to save him. But no saviour would ever come. Not for any of them.
And Anastasya would burn them all alive if they did.
The group kept moving. As the only two from Fjerda, who had witnessed—and in Anastasya’s case, lived in—the permafrost, she and Matthias were at the fore, leading the way. The snow and trees were almost identical, she was sure to everyone else the terrain looked unchanging, but to her every boulder, every patch of ice, every crop of bush, every tree, sang familiar. She had rushed past these lands on horseback when she fled her smouldering village. She had played in these icy landscapes since she’d been first able to walk.
Kaz hobbled behind her, close-by, even though Anastasya and Matthias had been cutting a relentless pace, and she knew it must have been killing his leg. But Anastasya could not will herself to slow down, it was as if she had been possessed, answering the calls of the ghosts of her past. Inej made pace beside Kaz, Jesper and Wylan chattering just behind them, while Nina took up the back.
The sun moved across the sky, the only sign of the passage of time. It was cold, and even though they wore thick furs and snow boots, her friends shivered in their clothes and hugged themselves close. Anastasya felt something, but it was not the cold of the frost, no, she had been raised in this climate, snow was just another old friend. It was the chill of death.
“How much longer till we can make camp?” called Jesper from behind, his teeth chattering.
“Not much longer,” answered Matthias, his Fjerdan accent thick.
No matter how much time passed, Anastasya was still unable to feel at ease with the druskelle soldier. Once, he had tried to bond with her, find some commonality between them, these two Fjerdans in a foreign land, he pleaded for her help, to set him free so he may return home. But he found no kinship in her cruel, colourless eyes. Anastasya had done well to avoid Fjerdans and Ravkans alike in her time in Kerch, unwilling to face reminders of what she’d lost, of what she’d never had. When he spoke to her in Fjerdan, she had just laughed, and said, “Lone wolves die hungry.”
They hadn’t truly spoke since, not without Matthias calling her the demjin’s drüsje and spitting at her feet.
“Traitor,” he’d whisper when she walked by. “Murderer.”
“Skögga,” she’d seethe back.
Dead man. He’d always shut up after that.
Now, they had reached something of a peace accord. But it wouldn’t last. Matthias didn’t just hate her for being drüsje or for turning her back on him, he hated her for what she had done, what she had taunted him with when he got on her nerves. Burning a village alive—Anastasya was exactly the type of Grisha the drüskelle had been told stories about. Cruel and vicious and capable of wiping out towns and cities. Exactly the kind of Grisha who had burned his own village to the ground.
Anastasya couldn’t find it in herself to care. Good, she’d thought, fear me. Then you might leave me alone for one damned second.
But now, as she traversed the lands she had grown up in, felt the snow in her hair, the unforgiving glare of the Fjerdan sun—she felt as if little Anastasya was tugging at her clothes, begging her to say this wasn’t who she was now.
But that girl was dead. Anastasya had left her buried in the ashes.
“I see something.” Matthias’ voice broke her out of her morose thoughts. Her eyes followed where he pointed up ahead, where snow-covered wooden slats could be seen behind a white hill. “A roof. Perhaps somewhere to stow away for the night.”
But Anastasya barely heard him, and her heart lodged itself in her throat. Her eyes shut against the sundown.
“Finally,” whooped Jesper, running up beside her and Matthias, clapping his hands. “Some honest-to-God shelter.”
The others celebrated quietly, moving to make their way down the hill, discussing the prospect of a warm fire inside with some excitement. But Anastasya didn’t move a muscle, her eyes clenched shut, her heart thundering in her chest.
There was a shift of snow beside her.
“We can’t know that’s your village,” said Kaz, coming to stand beside her. No surprise that he already knew exactly what had petrified her so.
Anastasya sighed and opened her eyes. “This is the permafrost, Kaz. I lived here for thirteen years. We were the only ones here.” She could hardly speak over the lump in her throat. “This is it. You’re about to see exactly what I am.”
Kaz knew better than to offer empty platitudes or profess his sympathy. Instead, he stepped in front of her and forced her to meet his coffee-brown eyes. He had swapped out his crow’s head cane for a more conspicuous walking stick, but Anastasya found she had missed the deadly, golden crow beneath his hand.
“I know what you are,” he said, voice quiet but fierce. “And if you think whatever I see in that buried village is going to change that, then you don’t know me at all.”
She closed her eyes, briefly. “And what am I, Kaz? Because some days, I don’t even recognise my face in the mirror.”
“You’re a fighter,” he said without hesitation. And then he did something that shocked her; he took her gloved hand in his and held it tight. She could see the warring emotions in the lines of his face, something between longing and disgust. “A better one I’ve never met. And you’re going to keep fighting. This pile of ashes won’t defeat you.”
Warmth flooded her body as surely as if she had used her powers, but she compelled herself to let go of Kaz’s hand and watched instant relief flood through him. She might love him, he might even feel something for her in return, but she could not ask of him what he could not give.
“Come then,” she said, glancing at him with something between amusement and despair, “let’s face the ghosts of my past together.”
“As we always do,” Kaz said, shrugging. “How many enemies of yours have we fought together through the years?”
“My enemies?” Anastasya gaped. “I seem to remember many more of them gunning for you than for me.”
“Your memory must be failing you in your old age,” Kaz said simply, turning to her with a completely straight face. “A pity. Guess we’ll only have to split the money six ways instead of seven.”
“Watch yourself, Brekker,” Anastasya warned, flames lighting her fist as she held it up to his face. “Spontaneous combustion is very common in annoying little boys who don’t respect their betters.”
“How fortunate for you that you are a girl then.”
Anastasya scowled, but instead of turning him into a Kaz-kebab as she wanted, she extinguished her hand and reached into the snow. “Run,” she whispered, and when he didn’t move, she chucked a snowball at his back.
“You didn’t!”
But it wasn’t Kaz that had spoken. Jesper stood a little ways down the hill, a disbelieving grin slapped across his face. Kaz turned to him with a furious glare burning bright in his eyes but the damage had been done. Jesper had witnessed the chink in Kaz’s ruthless armour.
This time, Anastasya didn’t much care. She bent down and built another snowball in her palms.
“Don’t you dare—”
But Kaz’s protests had been cut short by three snowballs hitting him at once—one in the side, one in the chest, and one in the back. Wait, three? The trio turned to find Inej standing innocently behind Kaz, a scheming smile curling her lips.
It felt… strange. Good. To be standing here, with the only friends Anastasya had ever known, doing something so mundane.
This time, Kaz didn’t protest and decided to stoop to their level. A snowball hit Anastasya square in the face. Kaz, Inej and Jesper examined her as she stood there in the cold, the snow stinging her face and melting into puddles on her fur. Then, she laughed, full and hard and girlish, like she hadn’t laughed since she was a child. Glee burst in her chest, at the prospect of what was happening, of where they were, of what they were doing. Standing there, in the permafrost, minutes from where she’d burned down her village, because they were planning a heist of the Ice Court, and they were having a snowball fight.
The whole situation was so ridiculous. So utterly incomprehensible, she couldn’t help the bubbling laughter from escaping.
Jesper started to laugh with her. Inej watched her as if she’d lost her mind. But Kaz stared at her like this was his first time staring at the sun, a child learning the marvels of the world, all new and fresh and exciting. If Anastasya could have captured that look in a photograph, she would look at it every day.
She was still laughing when she readied another snowball and let it loose, her friends scurrying away from her down the hill as she unleashed a volley, the sounds of their laughter carrying on the wind and down into the valleys below.
After all, she was a girl born of the ice. They were just guests outstaying their welcome.
***
Though the snowball fight had stripped some of the fear buried in Anastasya’s bones, she was still not prepared for the sight she found in the snowy valley.
Where her village had once stood, where people had farmed and fished and traded, where children had played, where she had played, was nothing more than a mound of snow and ice. The destruction she had left in her wake could not be seen—if anything, it looked eerily peaceful. A village abandoned in the ice when the climate had simply become too much for its people. Not a testament to ruination and death.
Anastasya wasn’t sure what she had expected. Bones littering the ground? An area of earth untouched by snow and ice, as if it had been permanently marred by her fire? The still-burning corpses of the people who had raised her? Isabel, still strapped to the pyre?
But if that was what Anastasya had expected, she had simply been too self-centred. Time had no care for her petty grief, no care for her rage, her guilt. It had claimed this land as it did all things.
The water hears and understands. But the ice does not forgive.
An old, religious Fjerdan saying. But one that felt too fitting for what had happened here, for what Anastasya felt. The ice did not forgive, and it had claimed this land hand-in-hand with time.
At various points around the village, some structures remained: the post of the general store’s sign, broken in half and covered in ice, the foundations of the village elder’s home, buried deep under the snow. But the most spine-chilling of the remains of her village, stood off the side of the main square and under towering pine trees, the building Matthias had glimpsed over the hill.
Her family house.
The roof was mostly intact, wooden slats held tightly together to prevent the snow from falling in, but a large hole had been blown in the wood. Three of the outer walls were still undamaged, though one had been cracked in half. Anastasya stared at the building as if her parents and sister might walk out the front door, whole and alive.
The barn behind their house had been destroyed in her carnage and the space where it had once stood was claimed by the pine trees, their branches extending over the property like clawed limbs reaching for what was rightfully theirs. Anastasya wanted to scream. She wanted to vomit. She wanted a hug.
But she settled for clenching her chattering teeth together and refusing to meet Kaz’s searching eyes.
“Well, this is quaint,” said Jesper, hands on his hips as he surveyed the area they stood in.
Anastasya had not had the strength to tell the rest of the group where they made plans to stay the night. She would not stand in the way of the group’s success, even if she felt the hands of the ghosts of all those she had killed here on her skin. Phantoms who had waited here for years to claim their revenge.
She still couldn’t believe that she was here, standing in the ruins of her village, after all the years she had spent running from it all. The memories here felt as tangible as her powers, things she could reach out and touch, things that would burn her if she stayed too long. Anastasya shivered but it was not because of the cold.
“Maybe we shouldn’t stay here,” said Inej, warm, dark eyes seeking out Anastasya’s as if she knew where they stood. “It feels… wrong.”
“I’ll keep watch,” Anastasya announced with a clenched jaw, pointedly ignoring Inej. “I have a feeling I won’t be able to sleep anyway.”
These ashes won’t defeat you.
“Well, that’s handy,” said Jesper. “Because I am positively ready to collapse.”
“Me too,” Wylan groaned, shrugging the heavy pack off his back and onto the ground. “It’s so cold.”
Matthias looked at him. “It’s Fjerda.”
“Not just Fjerda,” said Anastasya, unable to keep the tremor from her voice. “This is the permafrost. The ice does not forgive,” she added in Fjerdan.
Nina nodded. “She’s right. I’m going to try and keep our bodies warm throughout the night but this is as dangerous as any fight. We can’t take stupid risks.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” asked Jesper, gesturing to the only standing building around them. Her house. Where she had been raised. Where Isabel had saved her. “Shouldn’t we go into the only place with walls around here?”
There were murmurs of agreement around Anastasya and she swallowed the lump in her throat down. This was it—the moment of truth. She would either break or stand. Fall or fly.
Anastasya pushed open the still-standing front door and forced herself to enter the house.
It was as if all of the memories she had tried to bury clawed their way to the surface. There was no air in her lungs and no amount of gasping would bring relief. The drawing room was as she always remembered, though the chairs and couches and paintings were half-burnt and covered in frost. The stairs were still whole. The main hallway, the kitchen. There was an untouched porcelain teacup on the kitchen counter—one of her mother’s collection.
Anastasya picked it up with her thick gloves and wiped the frost covering the carefully detailed markings on the porcelain, vivid purple wildflowers and snowbells curling around the edges. A sob racked her spine. The teacup fell from her shaking hands and smashed to pieces on the floor. It was as if all the strength left her body at once at the sound of the shattering porcelain and when she saw the pretty, painted shards scattered on the ground, her knees buckled.
“Anastasya,” called Inej, calm and soothing as always. But she sounded far away, a figment of her imagination—another one of Anastasya’s ghosts. “Ana. Look at me.”
But Anastasya saw nothing but the broken porcelain littering the floor of her childhood home. A home she had destroyed. A sister she had betrayed. A storm of guilt rose within her in a wave of nausea.
“Ana, you must stop this,” said Inej, voice steady.
Stop what? It had already been done.
“Anastasya.” This time the voice was rough, raspy and cold. It had pulled her back from the brink many times. But this would not be one of those times
There were faces surrounding her but she didn’t recognise them. She felt warm despite the ice outside. She was vaguely aware of people speaking around her, but the conversation made no sense.
“I’m going to slow her heart. Put her to sleep.”
“No.”
“Do it.”
“Then we’ll never get out of this house alive.”
Then there was a hand on Anastasya’s arm—she felt it through the layers of fur and wool she wore. “Remember yourself,” Kaz said. “Don’t let these ashes defeat you.”
You’re a fighter.
The clouds blinding her parted in her vision. The world came rushing back to her, who she was, where, what, when. Anastasya glanced down at her arms, spread out wide beside her, the tight grip Kaz and Jesper had on her, trying to pin her arms in place. The other crows were standing in circle around them. Then, she noticed the flames. Fire burning high and bright above their heads, eating at the remainders of her home, the last pieces of her past. The sky choked with smoke.
Sweat beaded across Anastasya’s forehead and she was on her feet in seconds, sweeping her arms in an arc, extinguishing the flames. Once she was satisfied the danger was gone, she fled from the kitchen, her panic carrying her outside. The icy air hit her face as she left the safety of the building, but finally, it felt like she could breathe again.
“What just happened?” Kaz demanded, no longer a friend or partner, but an underworld boss again. He stalked out of the house after her, his face hard and unreadable.
Inej followed him, but her expression was more tender. “More importantly, are you okay?”
“Most importantly,” Jesper’s voice rang out, his tall figure emerged through the doors and jumped into the snow in front of Anastasya, “can’t we have this conversation inside?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Anastasya said, hugging her arms around herself. “I’m fine.”
“Well, I love lying as much as the next guy but—”
Kaz cut Jesper off. “Is this something that will affect the job?” His voice was colder than the brutal wind cutting through Anastasya’s hair. “There is no room for mistakes. I won’t let anyone screw this up.” The real accusation of his words rang in the silence that followed: you’re a liability.
An ache settled in her chest, but she ignored it and sighed.
“I found out I had powers when I was just six years old,” Anastasya started, voice barely audible, looking anywhere but her three friends. “I was raised on stories of powerful and cruel drüsje, witches who slit the throats of little girls, who corrupted good men, and could burst a heart by just looking at it. I was terrified when I first used my power.”
Anastasya had been finishing chores all day and missed the celebrations of their village fete, an event that happened only once a year. The villagers would gather around large fire, where they burned their wishes for the year and melted real chocolate and mallow on sticks. But when Anastasya had arrived at the square, there were only embers left in the fire pits and everyone had retired to their homes. Saints, she remembered the rage that had burned in her tiny body that day. And all of a sudden, the fire came to life around her. All six of the stacks of wood began to flame again.
“My sister, Isabel, found me before anyone else and put out all the fires,” Anastasya continued, forcing the words past her lips. “She was four years older than me and smarter than I ever had been, she held my hands and told me no one could ever find out. That I would die if anyone did. But I never believed her, not really. I didn’t believe my own parents would turn against me. So, I kept practising. Foolish, stupid little girl. I would go out into the woods and make sparks fly, warm baby rabbits abandoned by their mothers, and build my own fires with a flick of the hand.”
“You were a child,” Inej said softly, placing a hand on top of hers. “You were just being you. It wasn’t a crime.”
Anastasya laughed bitterly. “Perhaps,” she said. “But I knew the world I lived in. I should have known better.”
“Then, when I was thirteen, a boy from the village had followed me home after a celebration.” Snot-nosed Sven. He had broken the girls in her village into following him around. “He cornered me in my family’s barn, tried to force himself on me. I didn’t even think. I didn’t have to. I wanted to hurt him. And I did.” He had burst into flame and dropped to the ground, screaming and rolling in the haystacks. A cruel boy. A dead boy. “Again, my sister found me before anyone else.”
Isabel had been seventeen then, and due to be married in a matter of weeks. But still, she hadn’t hesitated. Her beautiful, kind sister, who wiped the tears from her eyes and told her everything would be okay. Her selfless sister, who held her hands, who told her the boy had gotten everything he deserved.
“I told her what happened.” Isabel hugged her and said her goodbye. “When my mother and father finally arrived, Isabel took the blame.” She told them that it had been Isabel, not Anastasya, that had burned the boy when he tried to force himself on her. That Isabel had started the fire. That Isabel was the drüsje. And Anastasya had let her.
“You told me once your sister died for being Grisha,” said Inej.
“She did,” replied Anastasya, voice hoarse. “She died in my stead. It was my crime, my power, my fault. But she was innocent, she had no power of her own. The only thing she was guilty of was loving me.”
“Ana—” Inej started, but Anastasya cut her off sharply.
“Don’t,” she growled. “I let her take the fall for me. I let my father beat her bloody. I let her be stripped and thrown in the manure with our pigs. I let her waste there until the morning. I let her be dragged, barely alive, to our village elder for judgement. I let them build that pyre. I let them tie her to the stocks, naked, bleeding, covered in shit. She had bits of skin and muscle missing where the pigs had sated their hunger on her body. I let them start that fire. I let her burn. I let it all happen. Not once did I say something. Not once did I even think about it. I just stared at her until she was nothing but a blackened corpse, until the fires at her feet had turned to embers.”
Anastasya still remembered the smell of her burning flesh. Still remembered Isabel’s screams. When her sister visited her in dreams, her blue eyes were full of hatred. Isabel had not deserved her fate any more than Anastasya had deserved to live.
“You were just a child,” Inej whispered, horrified, her hand now seeking Anastasya’s and twining their gloved fingers together. “Raised in fear, in an isolated village—”
“I was a coward,” Anastasya cut in. “I should have died. I should have said something. None of you would have done what I had. None of you would have cowered.”
The silence that followed her statement spoke the truth of the matter, even if no one confirmed the words.
“But how—” Jesper’s words died on his lips, and he furrowed his brows as if contemplating something very dangerous. “I had always assumed that you turned the fires on them when they put your sister on that pyre. You know, as a spur of the moment vengeance thing?”
Anastasya choked back something between a laugh and a sob. “I don’t know what happened. One moment, I was staring at Isabel’s body on the pyre, and then the next, the brother of that boy was next to her, and he spat on her.” Anastasya was thrown back to that moment, to the scavenger birds circling overhead, to the smell of burned flesh, the morning sun blinding her. All the picturesque little houses hugging each other, the people of her village turning away from Isabel’s body to return to their daily chores, as if this was any other normal day. Her fiancé hadn’t even cried for her. No one but Anastasya mourned her sister.
Anastasya pushed on. “And then he was on fire. Someone tried to help, to put him out, and they caught fire too. It spread like a disease. Each person who dared too close, till the fire was taking children running to their mothers in fear. My parents didn’t know it was me, tried to move me, save me from the flames. My father picked me up, I remember turning to him, putting my hands on him and burning him from the inside.”
Her mother had screamed.
“Demjin,” her father spat with the last of his strength.
Her mother cowered in fear, with nowhere to go as the fires surrounded them on all sides. “Polgndushny,” she’d babbled, voice wavering, hands covering her mouth.
Anastasya tilted her head to the side, as if just seeing her for the first time. The young girl had always known her father was cruel, that he could do terrible things. But she had remained a naïve girl, blind in her belief that her mother loved her unconditionally. That she would have protected her and Isabel no matter what. But she had been worse than her father—she had watched, and watched, and watched. And she had made a coward of her daughter as well.
Anastasya reached out to her shaking mother, gripping her chin with her thumb and forefinger, as her mother had done to her every time she had done something wrong. She forced her mother to look at her, jerking her head away from the destruction.
“Now,” Anastasya said in disappointment, in the tone of a mother scolding a child. “Look at what you’ve done.”
Then, she’d turned and left her mother in the burning flames, with nothing to keep her company but the screams of the dying and everything she had ever loved in ashes.
“You always said your mother was dead,” Inej said, voice quiet.
“She is.” Anastasya’s voice was like a whip. “There is no way she could have survived. I burned everything, the people, the animals, the homes, nothing had been left.”
Polgndushny, her mother had called her. One with a rotted soul. And she’d had no idea just how rotten her daughter was.
“Clearly, something had,” Jesper said, gesturing at the remains of the house they now occupied. “Maybe only one thing, but still.”
“She’s not alive,” Anastasya insisted through gritted teeth. But even as she said the words, the seeds of doubt had been sewn, gnawing at her insides.
Inej squeezed her hand. “But what if she is?”
Anastasya ripped her hand away from Inej’s and stood. “Then either I will get my revenge or she will get hers.”
The wind howled in agreement.
Kaz, who had said nothing through the tale, who had stood unmoving as a statue, finally turned to look at Anastasya. When she met his eyes, the distance between them felt uncrossable.
“Do you still think you know just exactly what I am?” she asked him, refusing to cower or apologise or grovel. Never again. He would either have her as she was—too broken to fix, a vase that had been destroyed long ago and was put back together wrong, or he could send her back to Ketterdam and he would never have to fear her being a liability again.
Heat flared in Anastasya’s chest. Kaz’s bitter-coffee eyes didn’t leave hers. “I do,” he said. Then he glanced at the horizon. “There’s still hours of daylight left.” He turned to Jesper. “Tell Helvar we’re moving on, we’ll find someplace else to make camp.”
Relief and longing surged in Anastasya's stomach.
Kaz paused before walking away, his gaze connecting with hers once again. “This place is full of ghosts.”